Just saw dandykins' post- my fave are also the GMD prefolds! Especially the organic (not much more expensive) because they're so soft and, dare I say, snuggly. I think I mentioned on the other thread, I got some used ones too (same brand) from a used cloth diaper site, and that was great, less work because otherwise you have to prep new ones by washing and drying and washing and drying several times first. I like Thirsties duo with snaps with them. If you ever need just covers though, Nicki's Diapers doesn't charge shipping on any covers.

We have a handful of Bumgenious all in ones and a couple of their pocket diapers that we got as hand me downs from the friends who got them for day care. Pocket diapers don't make sense to me. The all in ones are super easy and not intimidating, but considerably more expensive, and take a lot longer to dry. Regardless, it seems like cotton is way superior to synthetics - I think all the weird stripping diapers and whatnot is only necessary for synthetics?

I also love cloth wipes and find them easier and more effective than disposable wipes.

also fwiw, I know it's not your decision but I really don't think changing cloth diapers is grosser than disposables. (In regards to your mom.) we send our kid with a travel wet bag in the diaper bag for used diapers, which is waterproof and zips closed, and I can wash it regularly with our diapers so it doesn't get smelly. I empty it when we get home into our larger diaper laundry bag so it's empty if he goes there ( or out anywhere else) two days in a row. Unless your parents are going to walk every poopy diaper to their outside trash immediately upon disposal, I don't really understand it being grosser? Also, my experience is that I am more likely to get more poop everywhere (me, baby, changing pad, baby's clothes...) with disposables than cloth, because while disposables are great for absorbing pee, I think cloth actually do better at absorbing and containing poop, plus you can us the clean part of the diaper for a first pass at wiping. I also think blow outs are more likely with disposables for the same reason. Just today, in fact, I saw as friend who's got a 3 month old, who uses disposables, and she pooped while I was holding her and it leaked out the top OF THE FRONT, onto her onesie, and apparently it was the second time today and my friend ran out of changes of clothes! that to me seems grosser than my cloth diapers.

Yep this is my experience too. Cloth is much better at containing blowouts. We had lots of blowouts with disposables up the back. Also, my experience is also that cloth is not at all more gross. I wonder if the concept is the harder thing for your mom to get her head around than the actual reality...? Also, cloth diapers have come a long way since we were kids - is it possible she's remembering the days of flats, pins and plastic pants? The other thing is that her mind might change with experience - again, our MIL was most comfortable with disposables before the baby came, but then she saw us using the cloth diapers, found it was easier than expected, and now she does both, no problem. I think it also might have been because we were using cloth wipes - even when using disposables, the dirty cloth wipes had to go in the diaper hamper or the wetbag. (Also, bringing a wetbag is a good idea regardless of whether you do cloth or disposables - if you do disposables, you will have poop blowouts, and a wetbag is perfect for storing poopie onesies.)

Back when our babe was a newborn we used more of a mix- disposables at night and when out and about, traveling, things like that. One thing to consider is will you be doing a loaf of laundry just got diapers or are you willing to mix clothes in with them? If mixing, you coul just start with a couple and see how it goes, get more if you like it. I don't know what your milk plan is but exclusively breastfed poop just disappears in the wash magically somehow so I have mixed our clothes with diapers with no ill effects. But if that grosses you out then get Enough for their own small load.

also fwiw, I know it's not your decision but I really don't think changing cloth diapers is grosser than disposables.

Also, my experience is that I am more likely to get more poop everywhere (me, baby, changing pad, baby's clothes...) with disposables than cloth, because while disposables are great for absorbing pee, I think cloth actually do better at absorbing and containing poop

^ All of this! Disposables are horrible for poosplosions and until my kids start solids, I put a cloth diaper wrap over disposables when I go out. I learned the hard way.

Also, I part-time cloth diaper! And I got all of mine used, except for the Disana tie-ons because they were way cheaper new than second hand (even after pointing this out, I couldn't get any second-hand sellers to go down in price). We use disposables at night and when we go out (I don't have a car and am not carrying around more crepe than I already need to) and cloth at home during the day.

Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:51 amPosts: 8123Location: United States of New England

you can definitely do part time cloth diapering. as far as finances go im not sure about the investment of cloth diapers vs paying for disposables in terms of part time but my guess is you still might be on the winning end doing cloth part time especially if you find stuff at a consignment shop or second hand.

we did cloth exclusively until BP was over 2 and then switched to disposables because we were having pee blowout issues with the covers. toddlers pee different than newborns and also have bigger bladders so there is something called flooding which is when a toddler pees all at once and we were having frequent blowouts because the pee would just go through the covers. some of our covers were old so we just stopped using them rather than buying all new stuff. i was hoping she would potty train soon after we switched to disposables. ha ha on me on that one she wont be potty trained til she's like 42 probably.

im not sure how old you are or how old your mom is but i know my parents and in laws did cloth diapers when we were little because that's all their was (i will be 39 next month) and both my mom and my MIL were like OMG these cloth diapers of today or so much better than what we had!

also yeah you can get a travel sized wet bag and then the wet bag is stinky and not their trash can.

My mom had me in disposables, so I don't think she had much experience actually using cloth diapers. But she did WEAR them, so maybe she just knows from talking with elders? Also, she may have babysat: I don't know. Our modern cloth diapers certainly weren't a thing in the early 1990s, though, so I know she hasn't used one before, and probably didn't learn a lot about them.

Maybe she'll change her tune if she seems me changing at a visit or something. I'll keep that glimmer of hope. But really: she's helping me out so much already, I don't know if I want to push this. She'll probably keep diapers on hand, anyway, so it won't affect me much financially beyond sending the kid off in a disposable when she babysits. Since most daycares won't work with cloth, I'll probably be doing that anyway, so one more diaper? No biggie.

With my budget and odd schedule, I really can't afford to be picky with daycares. If I find one that works with cloth, I'll probably cloth mostly-full-time. But I know that the poor kid daycares are usually the ones less likely to work around "crunchy" things, so I don't know. I'm trying to be proactive to both possibilities.

You have a coin/shared laundry, right? Unless you get some free/very cheap used cloth diapers, I'd be surprised if it would be cost-effective to part-time cloth diaper. It does depend on how much your laundry costs of course, but since cloth diapers often need more than one wash cycle, the cost of laundering them could really add up.

It's really not even clear that cloth diapering is the more eco-friendly option, if that's a concern for you. Especially with the water shortages out here in the West.

regarding eco friendly, cloth is superior if you consider waste. that's the real benefit for me. I think.everyone has made good points and I think.you should just decide when bubs is like six weeks old or something. Do disposables til then, if you get a few cloth as gifts fhen great, you can try them. We do cloth part time and I view every change I do as cloth as one less nappy in landfill.

regarding eco friendly, cloth is superior if you consider waste. that's the real benefit for me. I think.everyone has made good points and I think.you should just decide when bubs is like six weeks old or something. Do disposables til then, if you get a few cloth as gifts fhen great, you can try them. We do cloth part time and I view every change I do as cloth as one less nappy in landfill.

Totally-- I cloth diapered my kids at various points (even when I had three kids in diapers). I hated seeing the bags of waste generated by disposables. I just wanted to offer the perspective that it really isn't clear cut which is better for the environment when it comes to disposables vs cloth when you consider energy usage/water usage/waste generation. I don't think anyone who uses disposables full-time should feel like they are committing some grave crime against the environment, that's all :-).

Since going back to work/starting daycare at 12 months we switched to disposables and the bags and bags of diapers going in the trash make me so sad. I shudder to think about how many bags of waste the daycare must produce in one day.

My apartment laundry recently went up to $3.00 for a standard load, wash and dry. So with a double-wash I guess that would be. . . $4.75? Yikes.

My partner wants us to move pretty early into the kid's life anyway, so that could change. But I don't know if we'll ever be able to afford a place with laundry in unit. MAYBE a place that uses a less-crazy-expensive company, but I don't know.

Thanks for the reassurance on not killing the environment. One thing I'm trying to do which should help a bit is that I'm keeping an eye out on a local baby swap group for overflow diapers that kids grew out of. When they're cheap enough to be worth it, I'm jumping on that. This also means I'm not directly supporting fishy companies, in addition to saving some diapers from the landfill.

Realistically, this won't be my entire stash, or even the majority. But I guess every little bit helps?

1. I have never done more than 1 wash for my diapers. However I do wash on the hottest setting and do an extended rinse cycle, neither of which I do for normal clothes. This is also part of why I would only recommend cotton, it seems like microfiber and whatever other synthetics need weird washing regimens more?

2. I really don't think it's a toss up environmentally. The water that goes into producing new things is so massive, it's really hard to imagine that washing diapers comes anywhere close to the amount of water involved in producing new paper diapers for every use. But there are lots of other factors too, not the least of which is, as others have mentioned, the fact that they will sit in a landfill. That doesn't mean it's the right option for everyone, or for all the time, or that I think anyone needs to feel guilty for using paper diapers. Like I said earlier (or maybe in another thread) if I had to pay for laundry, there's no way I'd wash at home, Fortunately for me a diaper service would have made sense if that were the case- it's what I was considering earlier on in my pregnancy, but then we moved when I was 6 months pregnant to a place where we don't have to pay. ( It is still a two story trek down to the basement, and we share two washers and two driers with 5 other apartments including another cloth diapering family, so I feel you, OSO, on the longing for in unit laundry! We'll never be able to afford it either.)

Anyway, I make decisions all the time that are not the most environmentally friendly but are more cost effective or convenient for me at a particular time. In a perfect world it would be easier to always make the healthier choices, for ourselves and the planet, but most of the time it's not easy, and theres only so much we can each do, so we have to take it easy on ourselves sometimes.

3. I have a couple newborn sized covers that I could mail you if you want, OSO. I may possibly have some Thirsties Duo sized 1 covers that I could send too, by the time you would need them, but right now my kiddo is juuust squeezing into them still. I unfortunately don't have any newborn sized prefolds, since we were gifted with a few months of diaper service and he outgrew newborns and was into small a by the time we started washing our own. I have about a dozen small prefolds I could send if you wanted to try those out though. I would want to consider them a loan though, as I'm pretty sure I want another kid and would want to use them again. Not for a couple years yet though, so the outgrown diapering supplies are just sitting idle right now and I'd always rather see things being used than sitting in a drawer. Anyway, if you're interested send me a pm!

What goes into a diaper? Electricity, water and raw material. And how different are the two diaper options? Disposable diapers generate vastly more landfill waste than reusables, of course. But it takes a lot more water to make a cloth diaper than a disposable one, mostly to grow and process the cotton. When the water used to wash the reusables is added to the equation, cloth diapers require twice as much water as disposable diapers do. I was shocked when I found this gem of information hidden in the calculations of a U.K. Environment Agency report comparing cloth and disposable diapers.

The same report calculated every resource used, from water and energy to plastics and cotton, throughout production, use and disposal of the respective diaper products. This more comprehensive analysis calculated the relative environmental impact on everything from global warming to toxic waste. I’ll get into the details in the Nitty-gritty, but here’s the real surprise: cloth and disposable nappies come to a near tie in overall environmental impact.

Cloth and disposables have similar global warming impact, though for different reasons. The manufacturing of disposable diapers has a larger carbon footprint, but the electricity used to wash reusable diapers cancels out most of the difference. Disposables have greater impact on ozone depletion, thanks to CFCs released as they decompose in the landfill. But cloth diapers generate more toxic waste that can impact human health, because of the electricity, detergent and softener used to wash them.

Hey actually I have 4 Bummis covers that I didn't like and I have had them posted for sale for months but nobody wants them. I could probably mail those to you if you want? They are for 8-15 lbs but I always found that they didn't fit well until Baby Lobster was a bit bigger (she was 8 lbs 4 oz at birth and I don't think these fit her for a couple of months). Anyway let me know if you are interested! (I didn't like them much because they are velcro and I preferred snaps, so you could keep them indefinitely).

_________________I like my bagels like I like my men - big and covered with earth balance & nooch. - Bunniee

Ok, I took a look at the UK Environmental Agency report that the blog quotes, I didnt get through the whole thing but looked through the first hundred or so pages, because I had a lot of questions and I find the subject of embodied energy and energy use, and of durable goods vs disposable quite interesting. I think their study was quite thorough in trying to track all the different stages of lifecycle and the many arenas of environmental impact. However, as their study states, consumer use patterns for wash at home diapers vary quite a bit, and they had a lot of trouble getting much survey participation, so their numbers for home washed diapers are much more of a guess than for diaper services (still somewhat questionable accuracy) and for disposables (the most reliable info of the bunch.)

Some of their assumptions for home washing were very surprising to me- not sure if that's because of different habits in the UK vs. US, if I'm just an outlier in terms of my washing habits (probably true to some extent), if their assumptions are outdated in some areas, or based on the survey participants that they did get being outliers. Probably some combination. Here's what surprised me:

-They assume that flushable or disposable liners are used consistently, and of those, half are flushed and half are put in the trash. So, there would either be some solid waste still going to the trash, or they figure and average of 7 liters per toilet flush, and that home washers are flushing 2.9 times per day! So their numbers for consumer water use are not limited to washing machine use, but also include 21 liters a day due solely to flushable liners! At 8 months in, we have yet to use a liner. I know some people do, but I would assume most don't until transition poops, so even for liner users, that's probably not happening for the full 2.5 years that they assume diapers are used for the purpose of this study. So far, we are just having occasional transition poops that need to be flushed as we're still in the early days of solid foods, but probably I've needed to flush stuff about 5 times over the past two months.

-They talk about toxicity of washing water due to detergents, sanitizers and fabric softeners. They assume that all home diaper washers are soaking used diapers in a pail of water (more water use!) with a sanitizer added. First, I know that wet pails used to be common but I thought that was outdated and nobody does that anymore, partly because it's gross and partly because it is more hazardous to mobile babies. They also don't differentiate between any different kinds of detergents, and I am not saying there's zero environmental impact from more natural hippie detergents, but I think they're quite different in terms of water toxicity than a more conventional detergent. I have also never used a fabric softener for my diapers. (Or any laundry.)

-They assume washing every two days. I think there are plenty of people who do that, but personally, I don't have that kind of energy or time... we wash ours roughly every 4-5 days. Sometimes we've taken them with us traveling (by car only!) and even gone longer before washing. So in terms of washing machine electricity and water usage, I personally use about 50% or less than what this study assumes.

-They also talk some about the environmental impact of growing cotton, which I know is considerable and is the main argument I've read before of why cotton diapers aren't necessarily more environmentally friendly than disposables. But: I didn't see any differentiation between organic cotton and conventionally grown (again, I know there's not NO impact for organic, but I do think it matters) and they assume all the cotton is bleached during processing. Personally, during our diaper service use, those were all bleached cotton but all the diapers I've bought, either new or second hand, have been unbleached and the ones I've bought new were organic. (Not sure about our secondhand ones.)

-The study also doesn't spell this out, but it seems that they assume all new diapers to be used for each child. To me, a huge benefit of cloth is that they can be used for multiple kids. I probably want to have another kid, and definitely plan to reuse them if we have another kid, and plenty of our diapers have already been through other kids- either because I bought them secondhand, or because we got them as hand me downs from friends. (In the case of one family we got hand me downs from, they've already been through TWO babies. I did have to do some mending to them- these are our all-in-ones, and the corners of the inserty flap things were pulling away from the rest of the fabric, but it's a fairly easy fix.) I'm sure there are also plenty of diapers that only get used for one baby, or that people buy and decide they don't like so they don't even get used for 2.5 years as the study assumes, but I know there are at least lots of other people who decide to go for it based on economics because they assume they will use them through multiple siblings. Obviously if you average the initial environmental impact of production out over multiple kids, it quickly becomes significantly less per kid.

-They also assume 9.5% of home washed diapers get ironed! I don't think that has all that much bearing on the final energy use numbers, but this just seemed crazy to me! Does anybody really iron their diapers?

-They also don't touch at all on cloth wipes vs. disposable wipes, and if you're already washing cloth diapers, wipes are so physically tiny that they don't add any extra washing cycles, but there is certainly some amount of environmental impact from production of disposables, as well as of cloth. But then, most of our cloth wipes I cut up from an old flannel sheet, that had gotten so threadbare it tore in a few places and was no longer usable as a sheet, so I consider that zero embodied energy because it was repurposed from something that was no longer functional.

So, based on the study saying they're more or less equal, and how my personal habits are different from their assumptions about home washers, I conclude that my personal habits are substantially more environmentally friendly than my use of disposables would be.

Hey actually I have 4 Bummis covers that I didn't like and I have had them posted for sale for months but nobody wants them. I could probably mail those to you if you want? They are for 8-15 lbs but I always found that they didn't fit well until Baby Lobster was a bit bigger (she was 8 lbs 4 oz at birth and I don't think these fit her for a couple of months). Anyway let me know if you are interested! (I didn't like them much because they are velcro and I preferred snaps, so you could keep them indefinitely).

electric_claire, that is so cool! Thanks for researching all of that! I definitely dry pail, don't use flushable liners, at least half of them were unbleached cotton, and I don't wash diapers every day or even every other day. Nearly all my diapers were second (and third or more) hand (10 of the the Disana organic cotton tie-ons were new) and I've used them for 3 kids and am going to use them for a 4th, so it's definitely been worth it for the environment for me, as far as I'm concerned.

Hey actually I have 4 Bummis covers that I didn't like and I have had them posted for sale for months but nobody wants them. I could probably mail those to you if you want? They are for 8-15 lbs but I always found that they didn't fit well until Baby Lobster was a bit bigger (she was 8 lbs 4 oz at birth and I don't think these fit her for a couple of months). Anyway let me know if you are interested! (I didn't like them much because they are velcro and I preferred snaps, so you could keep them indefinitely).

I'm glad you did that electric Claire, very interesting and what I have suspected for a while. I imagine the environment agency had an agenda when they did their research and made their assumptions. No one ever considers the production costs either when comparing environmental impact because it has just been co-opted by marketeers to make us buy more stuff.

Has anyone used Kawaii diapers? I heard about them on a blog and MAN they are cheap! Even used "normal" brands of cloth diapers go for more on the local Facebook swap. Used.

I'm kind of worried that the cheapness might mean a sacrifice in quality. Certainly, there's no sacrifice in cuteness. I've added a few to my tentative Babylist registry. . . but I'm wondering if anyone has any first-hand experience?

Thanks! I ran 12 diapers + 2 wet bags + 2 sets of cloths through to get a gauge on total price (am I underestimating the amount of wipes needed for part time diapering? probably? lol?), and the subtotal was under $125! Damn!!!

I'm not sure how many wipes I had for full time cloth diapering. I took a few pair of older flannel pyjama pants that I had and cut them up into squares. I then layered two squares together and zig zag stitched around the edges and voila, wipes! I think I had about 15 kawaiis in my stash. It was definitely the bulk of it. I will say that Baby Lobster didn't fit into one size kawaiis until she was 3 or 4 months though.

_________________I like my bagels like I like my men - big and covered with earth balance & nooch. - Bunniee